This seems like a fairly common assessment on these forums, but everyone's experience is going to differ. I had 3 years C++ experience and 4 years programming experience when I headed into "Intro to Programming" my first semester of college. It essentially served the purpose of being a tool to help me expand my skills to a new language, being C#. The course was quite accelerated, they had us doing all kinds of crazy shit in the console the second week of school (scrolling text, recursive functions, user input for simple grading systems). By the fourth week it was "Here's code for a blackjack game, convert the relationship between these two classes from inheritance to composition". It was easy as hell for me, but it weeded out the weak from the strong extraordinarily fast.Trask wrote:Agreed with the 'intro to programming classes being a forced joke' thing, it would be nice if you could test out of it or something. Save money and time, hell if you're in the right school, you could fill that in with an elective to better round your skills or even introduce you to a new area of learning.
By the second month, 1/4 of the class was gone, by the end of my first semester 1/2 of them were toast. We moved on to 2D graphics and ultimately were asked to come up with a project which included all of what we had learned and more. It had to consist of multiple applications (ie. we did an arcade with 4 games), utilize some sort of graphics, and have a client-server network communication aspect. I was quite impressed with some of the guys that made it through, but not at all surprised that the ones who didn't well.. didn't (they all switched from software engineering to game design and development).
Although I had a solid understanding of programming before, the class did present a strict agenda with a slight challenge for me. Best of all, I learned a new language, which never hurts. (Unfortunately I can't say the same thing for my high school VB class which SUCKED hardcore monkey ballz). Good luck!
